A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [14]
Besides, his favorite sport was actually hockey. But there wasn’t a hockey team in Kennewick. And at the time, I don’t even think there were any black players in the NHL. I remember the New York Rangers were always playing on the USA Network and that was Matt’s favorite team. I’d hear him shouting and cheering from his bedroom (he was lucky enough to have a TV in his room). He really got into it. Sometimes I’d watch the Rangers with him, but I couldn’t get excited about it.
I much preferred watching football with him. We would usually turn down the volume and pretend to be the play-by-play announcers. We were big fans of Howard Cosell and Brent Musburger. This was also around the time when we tape-recorded fake talk shows with fake commercials, inspired by Martin Mull’s old show, America 2-Night.
At school, Matt mostly hung out with three guys who also felt like outsiders. Anthony was Japanese, George was Mexican, and J.D. was Ukrainian. They called themselves the United Nations.
J.D. was Matt’s closest friend and they did things pretty often after school. The first time that Matt went to J.D.’s house didn’t go well though. He rode his bike there after school and knocked on the door. Apparently, J.D.’s mom didn’t know that her son had a black friend. She opened the door with a look of panic on her face and told Matt that he couldn’t come in. “You shouldn’t be friends with J.D.,” she said. “If my husband finds out, he will shoot you.”
Matt got on his bike and rode home in tears. J.D. heard about what had happened and confronted his parents. He told them that Matt was his friend for life and that he would not allow them to treat him like that again. After that, Matt spent a lot of time at J.D.’s house and his parents never had a bad thing to say.
Still, Matt did wonder if there was a gun in the house, and if it had ever been fired.
Monday Mornings
I was addicted to football statistics.
Every Sunday during football season I would jump up and down and yell at the television.
Then, on Monday mornings, I would sprint the two blocks to the newspaper machines at the post office. My dog, Scooter, would lope alongside me and I pretended he was a linebacker trying to tackle me. I’d always bought a USA Today or a Seattle Post-Intelligencer because they had the best stats; I’d cut them out and later add them up during my first-period class. I never liked the Seattle Seahawks because I had an unexplainable dislike for local teams. My favorite football team was the St. Louis Cardinals (who later became the Arizona Cardinals). Picking my favorite team as a kid was mostly based on who had the coolest helmet. I liked the profiled cardinal head and the dark red of their uniforms. All my friends liked the other popular teams of the seventies—the Cowboys, Steelers, and Chargers. The Cleveland Browns didn’t have anything on their helmets. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would like them.
As I ran back home I would imagine myself as a wiry punt returner like Terry Metcalf or a powerful running back like Ottis “OJ” Anderson. My dog was actually named after Ottis Anderson. I had heard that Ottis had the nickname Scooter when he was younger.
The newspaper in my hand turned into a football and I would dodge tacklers, set records, and make highlights that would never be shown.
Tackle Football
Matt and I played football a lot growing up. Most of the time we’d play with the neighbor kids in Miss O’Hara’s yard, which was about half the size of a real football field. We’d ask her first and most of the time she’d say yes, unless she had company and didn’t want to hear all of our yelling. We called her yard O’Hara Stadium. We had to be careful because there was a water faucet sticking up, about groin-level, right in the middle of the field. Amazingly, we avoided any serious injuries there.
I loved playing football but played only one season in high school. I didn’t like having to memorize plays